Meeting 66 - May 2018

Observational Cosmology: The next generation of telescopes ~ Steve Cunnington (Univ. of Portsmouth

Whilst we have been studying the night sky for millennia, it is arguably only in the last several decades that we have had instruments with sufficient sensitivity to probe beyond our own galaxy and study our Universe in any detail. In this respect the topic of cosmology is one which is very young and hence developing fast. I will give a brief overview of some of our most exciting discoveries in the field of cosmology and the evidence for these. I will then look to the future and introduce some of the large global collaborations such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), the Euclid Consortium and the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) expected to begin in the 2020's. These are all expected to provide unprecedented amounts of sensitivity and means there is increasing excitement for the future of cosmology.

The Casimir Effect and and minus one twelth ~ Justin Allen

Though I intend to cover the Casimir effect in reasonable detail, talking about a couple of experiments that have verified it, even going into the mathematics of it a little, where the zeta function crops up, then going into this peculiar sum of integers equals -1/12 result, and how it can make sense in the context of the Casimir Effect.